Reviews:

From a Remote Corner of the World

The spirit of the place resides in the waterfalls, the hot springs, the moss-covered cliffs, and the glistening ice. Olafur Eliasson displays color photographs in intimate formats that showcase landscapes from Iceland. These are three neo-romantic series that revolve around waterfalls, hot springs, and ice. They are silent images that allow nature to speak.

The waterfall series showcases waterfalls from across the island of Iceland. The water flows, the currents spread out, plunge over plateaus, transform into cascades, and break the light like gemstones. Eliasson’s color spectrum is like looking into a jewel. The waterfalls are presented in various color spectra, partly seen under different natural daylight conditions and partly through artificial color filters. From natural tones, the waterfalls move into shades of purple, yellow, orange, and dreamy blues, becoming purple, yellow, orange, and blue waterfalls for the soul.

At the edge of the world, people live beside the waterfalls. You see houses and waterfalls, a campsite and waterfalls, a playground and waterfalls. In a series featuring hot springs from The Blue Lagoon, people almost vanish in the mist of the springs, framed by an industrial landscape—the geothermal power plant that supplies heat to the entire town. There is a unity between humanity and nature.

A third series features blocks of ice in landscapes. Here, the focus shifts to another aspect of nature—stillness and solitude. The sky is heavy and white with snow, while the glacier blocks are a crystal-clear blue, sparkling in a white snow-covered landscape. The ice block becomes the center of the world, a center that closes in on itself, completely self-referential.

Landscape Abstractions

Eliasson uses a modern medium—photography—which adds authenticity and a sense of place. Photography can be a simple medium, representing an innocent gaze. It doesn’t construct or glorify. If landscape photography is grand, it’s because nature itself is grand.

The artist works within a landscape tradition that begins with Dutch landscape painting in the 1500s and culminates with German Romanticism, represented by Caspar David Friedrich. In Friedrich’s work, man turns his back on the world. Eliasson, however, turns his back on the modern world by choosing Iceland as his motif. The solitary wanderer does not stand self-consciously atop a mountain gazing out over everything as in Romanticism. In Eliasson’s work, the wanderer is depicted as tiny, completely submissive to the power of the landscape.

Olafur Eliasson’s images are counter-images to a world that is increasingly dominated by technology. They can be seen as expressions of contemporary thoughts about New Age, holism, and ecology. Eliasson searches for the origins of the landscape and finds them, but far away. Iceland is an island at the edge of the world. It’s a point in the images that we are looking at something geographically distant,

something that must also feel far removed for the artist himself when he isn’t working in Iceland. The origins exist, but they are far away.

Eliasson captures something timely—a longing for origins. His reputation has grown significantly internationally, and in 1996, he participated in many major exhibitions abroad. In 1997, he will exhibit at Art Chicago under the guidance of his gallerist Tanya Bonakdar in New York.

Olafur Eliasson’s images are simple, miraculous pieces of nature. Miraculous as the interplay of light and color in waterfalls and hot springs rising from the earth. Eliasson seeks the foundation. Magically, the essence of the landscape is encapsulated in Eliasson’s photography, conveying its pure existence to the viewer.

Olafur Eliasson, “New Photographs,” Stalke Gallery, runs until May 17.

By Hanne Stine Hansen

Reluctant Nature Brought Indoors

OLAFUR ELIASSON

Most people probably associate the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson primarily with his enchanting installations. In these, he draws on his Icelandic background with distillations of natural phenomena, which he stages in his very own way.

The immediate sensory experience is central in these works, as one could, for example, experience at the exhibition "The Scream" at Arken. Here, he participated with a fountain exposed to strobe lights, where each individual drop of water seemed frozen in an eternal, hallucinatory now.

However, the young artist, who has in recent years broken through internationally, has also worked with photography.

At Stalke Gallery in Copenhagen, one can currently experience three new photo series, which in a different and more subdued manner play on the reflective. Here, Eliasson brings natural phenomena such as waterfalls, fog, and icebergs into the cultural space — in this case, the gallery.

Vertical Falls

The first series encountered is the "Waterfall Series," consisting of 50 photos of various vertically falling water formations.

As the photos are hung "shoulder to shoulder" with highly varied structures, ranging from fine-grained to coarser textures, each is marked by a unique tone. Some images feature acidic color filters, transforming this natural phenomenon into a serial sequence of exclamation marks.

While the Romantic era’s waterfall images evoked pathos, Eliasson’s registrations and souvenirs from Icelandic nature convey something more artificial and pseudo-scientific.

A small "steam-fog" series, where not just water particles in the air but also colorful filters obscure the view, strikes a lyrical tone.

Manipulation with Stones

Equally ephemeral, yet still solid, is the "Stone Series," comprising 39 small photographs of individually depicted bluish stones. These were swept downriver during a flood following a volcanic eruption in southern Iceland. Now, they are melting just as slowly.

There is a highly distanced and pseudo-documentary feel to this series. Instead of reflecting reality’s proportions, Eliasson has technically manipulated the stones’ varying sizes to dominate the frames equally.

The restlessness underpinning Eliasson’s repetitions empties the motifs of their raw "diamond-like" significance. Rather than serving as a medium for contemplation and devoted immersion, Eliasson’s nature series come across as a more dismissive statement, prompting us to reflect on how we perceive Icelandic scenery.

See the list: Kunst, Copenhagen

By Malene La Cour Rasmussen